No Easy Answers

A Grim, Challenging Novel About A Girl Who Has To Hate

Occasionally a reviewer encounters a book that defies easy classification. And often that is a welcome event, because a little bewilderment can be a stimulating thing.

James McManus` third novel, ``Ghost Waves,`` is just such a puzzler. Ostensibly, it`s about a 19-year-old Chicago girl named Linda Krajacik. A songwriter/student/artist/alcoholic, Linda spends much of her time sipping straight Bombay gin and obsessing about her dead father, who was quite literally blown out of her life by a land mine in Vietnam before she was born. Lately she`s also been obsessing about her mother Maggie`s new husband, a man Linda alternately and derisively calls ``Rick Dick Rich Richard`` and

``RBaum.`` The high-powered Mr. Baum, nine years younger than his wife and nine years older than his stepdaughter, trades in grain futures on the commodities market. He wears red suspenders, carries an American Express platinum card and owns a Mercedes, a Porsche and a Lamborghini.

His home at Wolf Point, located in one of the five or six buildings he owns in the Chicago area, is so spectacular that it has been featured in the Tempo section of The Tribune. He`s driven, he says, by ``the sex life of wheat.``

Linda loathes Mr. Baum. Aside from the fact that he is a pretender to the throne she`s built for her long-dead father, she hates his greedy, amoral approach to his profession. She devises elaborate, imaginary scenarios in which she is personally responsible for his financial ruin.

For reasons that are almost as unclear to Linda as they are to the reader, she has enrolled at the School of the Art Institute in Chicago in a course called ``Aesthetics and Physics,`` ``A & P`` to Linda. Her professor, an illuminating guy named Strobe, defines for her a principle she`s been wrestling with without knowing what to call it. From Strobe, she not only learns that colors have wavelengths, but also that experience and emotion reverberate through time and space-creating ``ghost waves,`` if you will. Is it possible that the past is one with the present, that imagination is as powerful as reality?

``If ghost waves exist,`` says Strobe, ``it would mean that, just as a film or a piece of music can be played backward, or a painting can be seen in a mirror, sub-atomic particles could send messages to one another backward through time. . . . Another way to answer would be to suggest that what particle physicists and artists both do is track the transformations between physical reality and our inner experiences. Ok? That neither are in the business of giving out too many answers these days. They describe things in ways that make us all more aware of the possibilities-of more, and more interesting, questions.``

A native Chicagoan who also happens to teach at the School of the Art Institute, McManus is no believer in easy answers. About the only thing we`re sure of in ``Ghost Waves`` is that Linda Krajacik is teetering on the brink of a nervous breakdown. She begins to hallucinate and is horrified by visions of her dead father in varying states of gore and decay. She imagines both her mother and stepfather slaughtered by terrorists. McManus used an abbreviated, staccato style in an earlier novel, ``Out of the Blue,`` and here the same approach effectively conveys the fragmented thoughts of a dysfunctional personality.

Yet it`s often as difficult to like ``Ghost Waves`` as it is to warm toward its disagreeable protagonist, a girl who seems to hate her life and everyone in it. An intellectually challenging book that goes to the heart of our most basic and most comforting assumptions about the nature of reality,

``Ghost Waves`` also is a grim, unrelenting, cynical piece of work. You won`t come away from it humming the tunes, that`s for sure. But McManus`

readers ought to admire the scope and daring of what he has tried to accomplish.